User Tools

Site Tools

Table of Contents

Pandoc

Pandoc converts files between formats. It supports Markdown, HTML, DocBook, LaTeX, and others. We use it primarily to convert Markdown to other formats. Its version of Markdown seems to be better than the alternatives. It also support syntax highlighting for a wide variety of languages.

Prerequisites

To get PDF output, we'll need a version of LaTeX. We'll use the BasicTeX packages that Pandoc's site recommends.

Go the the MacTeX page and download both the MacTeX-Additions package and the BasicTeX package. Install both packages.

Installation

Pandoc is built with Haskell. It's possible to install Haskell from Homebrew, and install all the packages that Pandoc needs through cabal (the Haskell package manager) – but that's difficult and leaves a big mess. Instead, we just install the binary package from the Pandoc web site.

Download the latest Mac OS X package from the Pandoc downloads page. Open the image file and install the package.

Testing

Pandoc is a command-line utility – there's no GUI. To test, just run the following from the command line: